[cornholio]

These are all good arguments in favor of Paul's assertion that "Reddit is unkillable".

I mean, people still use it despite a complete cluster-bombed design, intense push towards monetization at the cost of user experience, atrocious management and clear dictatorial tendencies from the top muffin, etc. It seems not even Reddit itself can kill Reddit despite their best tries.

It's in the nature of their moat: millions of tightly focused small forums, each easy to duplicate on their own, but together making the Reddit account a gateway to an enormous chunk of the user-generated internet. You open a Reddit, and not, say, a Telegram channel, because that's where the users are, ready to form a coherent community around your topic.

What might finally do Reddit in, or at least open vast markets for copycats, is its intense need to fit inside the narrow Overton window of American politics, in order to be palatable as a publicly traded company. This has already led to extremely heavy handed bans of major reddits and things can only get worse. If it reaches the breaking point, you will see a mass migration of not only the ideology driven communities, but also the neutral ones like fandoms, hobbyists etc., because they will move to where the users are.

[beryilma]

> It's in the nature of their moat

On a tangent, what is the deal with the word moat and why is everybody using it all of a sudden? What does it mean?

[mikestew]

"All of a sudden"? I've heard that term used for probably twenty years now, if not more, originating (IIRC) with Warren Buffet. What does the moat of a castle do? Keeps the baddies out. What does the "moat" of a business do? Keeps the competitors out. To take a recent example, what would Nvidia's moat be? A strong argument could be made that it's CUDA. For the sake of argument, let's say anyone could throw a bunch of silicon on a PCB and make a GPU equivalent to Nvidia's. Doesn't matter, because your cheapo GPU won't run the CUDA software that makes Nvidia's dominance possible.

To offer one more example out of my butt, take Apple. The Apple brand makes up at least some of their moat. You could build an exact clone of an iPhone that even runs latest iOS (assume for the sake of argument that there's a way to get the OS on your hardware). Doesn't matter, unless you're ready to infringe on trademarks by putting an Apple logo on there, few will buy it because they want Apple, not a functional work-alike.

[crq-yml]

"Competitive moat." It's a term Warren Buffett has used often to describe businesses that have an advantage that blocks competitors, like a moat around the wall of a castle. Control over intellectual property rights is an example of such a moat.